30 THE GRAMMAR OF SCIENCE 



that the action of electro-magnetism is propagated in 

 waves Hke h'ght — in his confirmation of Maxwell's theory 

 that light is only a special phase of electro-magnetic 

 action — we have a result which, if of striking interest to 

 pure science, seems yet to have no immediate practical 

 application.^ But that man would indeed be a bold 

 dogmatist who would venture to assert that the results 

 which may ultimately flow from this discovery of Hertz's 

 will not, in a generation or two, do more to revolutionise 

 life than the frogs' legs of Gal van i achieved when they 

 led to the perfection of the electric telegraph. 



§ I I. — Science and the Imagination 



There is another aspect from which it is right that we 

 should regard pure science — one that makes no appeal to 

 its utility in practical life, but touches a side of our 

 nature which the reader may have thought that I have 

 entirely neglected. There is an element in our being 

 which is not satisfied by the formal processes of reasoning ; 

 it is the imaginative or sesthetic side, the side to which 

 the poets and philosophers appeal, and one which science 

 cannot, to be scientific, disregard. We have seen that 

 the imagination must not replace the reason in the deduc- 

 tion of relation and law from classified facts. But, none 

 the less, disciplined imagination has been at the bottom 

 of all great scientific discoveries. All great scientists 

 have, in a certain sense, been great artists ; the man with 

 no imagination may collect facts, but he cannot make 

 great discoveries. If I were compelled to name the 

 Englishmen who during our generation have had the 

 widest imaginations and exercised them most beneficially, 

 I think I should put the novelists and poets on one side 

 and say Michael Faraday and Charles Darwin. Now it 

 is very needful to understand the exact part imagination 

 plays in pure science. We can, perhaps, best achieve 

 this result by considering the following proposition : 

 Pure science has a further strong claim upon us on 



^ Even since this sentence was written a first and initially quite unexpected 

 application to practical life has arisen in wireless telegraphy ! 



